His social activity may have been deliberate preparation for his work, as his fifteen-year apprenticeship to Ruskin was preparation. Or it may have been a pose, much the same as his mannerisms, habits, customs, and possibly some features of his invalidism, were a pose. Surely he enjoyed the reputation of being “different.”
He ruminated on Rousseau and studied Saint-Simon. When he arrived at the stage where he could scoff at one and spurn the other, he learned Henry James by heart. Then he wrote; he had prepared himself. The deficit which art and endeavour failed to wipe out was compensated by his maternal inheritance.
One may infer whither he is going by reading Proust once, but to accompany him he must be read a second time. Those who would get instruction and enlightenment must read him as Ruskin, his master, said all worth while books must be read: “You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable.”
The discerning reader must look intensely at M. Proust's words. If he looks long enough they seem to take on the appearance of Mene, Tekel, Phares.
CHAPTER VI
TWO LITERARY LADIES OF LONDON: KATHERINE MANSFIELD
AND REBECCA WEST
Many persons are so constituted that they accept any positive statement as fact unless they know it to be false. Few more positive statements are made in print than “So and So is England's or America's or France's leading or most popular writer of fiction or verse.” Publicity agents have found apparently that such claim sells books and needs no substantiation. The reading public rarely protests. It denies in a more effective way, but before the denial gets disseminated many credulous seekers of diversion and culture are misled.
There are several young women writing fiction in England today of whom it can be said truthfully that they ornament the profession of letters. Women have long justified their reputation for being intuitive by their fictional writing. It is likely that they may proceed to establish an equal reputation for accurate observation, logical inference, and temperate narrative. Had not the waves of death recently encompassed Katherine Mansfield in her early maturity she would have remained at the top of the list, the place where now, varying with individual taste and judgment, stand the names of Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, Stella Benson, Virginia Woolf, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Mary Webb, Rose Macaulay, to mention no others. For the first time in history women prose writers preponderate, and it is a good augury for a country which has been so quickly and successfully purged of anti-feminism.
Katherine Mansfield's output has been small, but quality has made up for quantity. Her reputation is founded on two volumes of short stories. To say that they reveal capacity to create life, to recognise the temperament, intellectuality, and morality of the ordinary human beings that one encounters, and to display their behaviour; as well as a power to analyse personality and to depict individuality that equals de Maupassant, is to make a truthful statement, and a temperate one. Indeed, she seemed to her contemporaries to be possessed of some unsanctified and secret wisdom.
Her history is brief. She was Kathleen Beauchamp, third daughter of a man of affairs, recently knighted, and was born in Wellington, New Zealand. She was 23 years old when she married, just before the war, J. Middleton Murry, the British critic and novelist. Her first book “In a German Pension,” published when she was 21, gave no promise of great talent. Her first mature work was a series of book reviews in The Nation and Athenæum, about 1919. She was quickly recognised to be a subtle and brilliant critic. In 1920 the publication of “Bliss and Other Stories” revealed her metal and temper. Development and maturity marked her second and last collection, “The Garden-Party and Other Stories,” which followed in 1922. Hardly had the promise of her early work been recognised before it was overshadowed by progressive pulmonary disease, and after long months of illness, during which she was obliged to spend most of her time away from England, she died in France on January 9, 1923.
Katherine Mansfield had a technique which may be compared to that of a great stage manager. When the play is put on, the scenes and the characters, the atmosphere and the environment, the sentiment and the significance are satisfying, intelligent and convincing. The world seen through her eyes, and the conduct of its most highly organised product, is the world that may be seen by anyone who has normal, keen vision. The conduct of the people who encumber it is that which an observer without inherited bias or acquired bigotry knows intuitively, and has learned from experience, is the conduct that reflects our present development, our attitudes, our interests, our desires, and most of all our dispositions.